Thursday, September 29, 2011

We took part in the 2011 IIDEX/NEOCON tradeshow in Toronto this year. Our focus was on the custom design aspect of our business and also taking the opportunity to educate our visitors on the hand making process of carpets. We are happy to announce the show was a success! We mingled with a lot of incredible people and are very proud of our lovely booth.

A little tour of our booth - We had two large flatscreen tvs displaying a lengthy slideshow of the many custom rugs we've produced over the years. In front of our booth you can see our lovely ottoman covered in CMI samples.

The inside walls tell the story of how our rugs are made, from the dying of the yarns to the hand-weaving or hand-tufting process. We created large "unfinished" samples to hang on our walls, they were a big hit! Some of our visitors liked them so much they wanted to buy them.

We also had some tools on display used by the weavers in India and Nepal, Carol and Donna brought them back from their last trip in August.

And of course we had many drawers filled with beautiful samples to show off to our visitors.

September has been a busy but very rewarding month with the participation in the New York International Carpet Show and IIDEX. We were delighted by the feedback we received from both shows and are looking forward to DOMOTEX 2012 in a couple of months.

This september we participated at the New York International Carpet Show for the first time and it was a great success. Our new "Art Day" line was received very enthusiastically from our established retailers as well as new retailers. Our customers loved the description of the design process we took with the art day line and the carpets that have been produced are exceptional (Every 6 weeks at CMI we close the office for a few hours and we all create art, the design team, the book keeper and the receptionist too! The art day line is a culmination of all the efforts, reinterpreted by the design team into our newest collection).

We have exhibited two types of carpet - the hand knotted cut pile wool and silk, and the flat woven kilim's in wool and metallic yarn.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Every year Creative Matters hosts an art day with the children at Hamro Ghar in Nepal. These children have been rescued from the weaving looms in Nepal, a part of GoodWeave's initiative to end child labour and offer education. CMI has supported GoodWeave for a number of years but we also like to give directly to those children who have been taken advantage of. We do what we know well, support through creativity.

Once again, as every year, the children are enthusiastic hard workers who show tremendous creativity and artistry.

We began with life drawing, children painting each other in active poses including Krishna!

Then we moved on to a lesson on colour mixing as many had never used paint before. Then they painted large paintings of their favourite animals and their favourite holiday.

An obvious favoured holiday is the upcoming one "Dashain", where huge bamboo swings are built for the children to play on... the paintings caught the excitement of that holiday. As for animals...giraffes, tigers, elephants, peacocks, cats and birds.

We love to support GoodWeave, they are doing good work in Nepal by saving children from labour, giving them an education and generally improving the lives of the weavers. Donna and I were delighted to have the opportunity once again to spend time with these wonderful children. We thank the staff at Hamro Ghar who were so supportive.